Colonel Roosevelt (39 page)

Academics reverent of anything canonical in law or political doctrine were especially vituperative. Andrew Dickson White, the former president of Cornell, called the notion of popular amendment of state constitutions “the most monstrous proposal ever presented to the American people, or any other people.” James Day, chancellor of Syracuse University, declared, “Emma Goldman could not make a more violent attack on our institutions.” Even clerics weighed in. The aged Episcopal bishop of Albany, who had known Roosevelt since his days as governor, called him “erratic, unsafe, and unfair.”

Doubts about Roosevelt’s sanity recirculated. Justice W. O. Howard of the New York Supreme Court described him as “a madman” with “the instinct of a beast.” The editor of the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
theorized that the Colonel would “go down in history as one of the most illustrious psychological examples of the distortion of conscious mental processes through the force of subconscious wishes.” A Chicago lawyer offered $5,000 to any medical or charitable institution that could arrange to have Roosevelt certified. Henry Adams warned Brooks Adams, “His mind has gone to pieces.… He is, as Taft justly said, a neurotic, and his neurosis may end like La Follette’s, in a nervous collapse or acute mania.”

An appalled Henry Cabot Lodge could only say to reporters, “The Colonel and I have long since agreed to disagree on a number of points.”

ALMOST UNHEARD IN
the general uproar over Roosevelt’s speech was a casual remark he had made en route to Columbus: “
My hat is in the ring. The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.” It took several days for the seventeen monosyllables to work their way into the folk consciousness. But when they did, realization spread that he had, at last, confirmed his candidacy—in yet another of the popular images he coined so effortlessly. By 25 February, when he arrived in Boston to issue his formal acceptance of the petition of the governors, The Hat in the Ring had already joined The Man in the Arena, The Strenuous Life, The Big Stick, The Square Deal, The Black Crystal, and Malefactors of Great Wealth in the American political lexicon.

“
I WILL ACCEPT
the nomination for President if it is tendered to me, and I will adhere to this decision until the convention has expressed its preference.”

As Roosevelt’s letter to the governors went out on the evening wires, he relaxed in the Boston home of Robert Grant, a liberal and literary judge he had known for many years.
Grant thought that the Colonel had made a self-destructive mistake, and carefully observed his looks and behavior for the record. “I never saw him in better physical shape. He is fairly stout, but his color is good.… He halts in his sentences occasionally; but from a layman’s point of view there was nothing to suggest mental impairment, unless the combination of egotism, faith in his own doctrines, fondness for power and present hostility to Taft … can be termed symptomatic.… He was a most delightful guest.”

For all the pleasure Judge Grant took in the Colonel’s company—and that of William Allen White and the biographer
William Roscoe Thayer as fellow dinner guests—he was not disposed to congratulate him on running for the presidency again. “Has not every one of your friends advised you against it?”

Roosevelt admitted that was true. For a long time, he said, he had been “very uncertain” about what to do. But the urgency of the progressives who looked to him for leadership had finally convinced him that he had to rescue the reform program so disastrously mismanaged by President Taft. To have ignored their appeals, to have waited until 1916 to run again, would have been “cowardice,” he said—“a case of
il gran refiuto.
”

Dante’s phrase clearly appealed to him, and he repeated it, evoking the refusal of a thirteenth-century hermit to accept elevation to the Papacy.

“But you will agree that Taft has made a good president this year?” Grant spoke out of a sense of fairness, rather than loyalty to the administration.

Roosevelt said he thought that all Taft had done was to reduce the Republican Party to a torpor reminiscent of that of “the Bell and Everett Whigs just
before the Civil War.” He plunged into a discussion of patronage with White, and Grant noticed that he saw betrayal in every reasonable move Taft had made to consolidate himself as president.

“But will any of the Party leaders support you?” the judge asked.

“No. None of them; not even Lodge, I think.” He said he believed his only hope of winning was to “reach the popular vote through direct primaries,” in states democratic enough to hold them.

“But the situation is complex, I suppose? You would like to be President.”

“You are right, it is complex. I like power; but I care nothing to be President as President. I am interested in these ideas of mine and I want to carry them through, and feel that I am the one to carry them through.” He cited, by way of example, his belief that the will of the people was being “thwarted” by reactionary courts.

Grant was a bona fide member of the Harvard Republican establishment, but unlike most of his associates, saw no constitutional threat in the Colonel’s Columbus speech. Thayer did, saying that anyone advising the recall of judicial decisions wished to subject American institutions to “the whims of the populace at the moment.” Roosevelt, keeping his temper, pointed out that he had excluded the Supreme Court from his proposal. Nor was he advocating the removal of judges themselves. He was concerned only with judicial
decisions
at the state level, in cases where humanitarian legislation was struck down on fake constitutional grounds.

Thayer and Grant were impressed with his self-assurance. But Theodore in private was different from Theodore on the stump. They saw that his moral fervor, the way he had of charging argument with more passion than it needed, would prevent persons of colder blood from understanding that he was actually a thoughtful man.

For five hours, with White, they tried in vain to change his resolve to run. At eleven-thirty the party broke up. Thayer, who was not staying over, went out into the night,
feeling saddened and apprehensive. Just before the Colonel went up to bed, Grant made the mistake of mentioning his cool treatment of Taft.

Roosevelt stopped at the foot of the stairway. “It was through me and my friends that he became President.”

It was a tense moment. Both of them were aware that his announcement was even now thumping through printing presses across the country.

They continued on up the stairs. Roosevelt stretched out his arms and said, “I feel as fine as silk.”

THE CONTRARY FORCES ALIGNING
themselves for and against the campaign of Theodore Roosevelt to unseat his successor were on display in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 28 February 1912. He attended a meeting of the Harvard board of overseers and was ostracized by his fellow members. They stood with their backs to him until he was joined by a sympathetic friend, Colonel Norwood P. Hallowell. Yet on emerging into the Yard, he was greeted by a crowd so boisterously affectionate that ten patrolmen were needed to get him into his car. It was clear his only hope of being nominated was to appeal to the people over the opposition of conservative Republicans.

“
I am alone,” Roosevelt told his old hunting companion, Dr. Alexander Lambert, back at Sagamore Hill that weekend. “You can’t imagine how lonely it is for a man to be rejected by his own kind.” He said that he and Hallowell were made to feel “like a pair of Airedale terriers that had walked in on a convention of tom cats.”

In a cultural essay published some weeks before in
The Outlook
, he had noted that whenever a medieval man fought against prevailing orthodoxy, the tendency of society was to outlaw him. Now, after a lifetime of Party regularity, he found himself both free and shunned, loved and despised. It took some getting used to, and a considerable amount of evasion when friends as worried as William Allen White asked if he was prepared, in the likelihood of defeat, to found a new party. “
We made the too obvious pretense in those days
of our party loyalty,” White wrote afterward, “whistling in unison through the tall timber of darkening events to support our courage.”

As March loomed, Taft’s organization accelerated the pace of delegate selections in states that it controlled. This portended an agonizing choice for Roosevelt Republicans, bluntly expressed by Senator Jonathan Bourne of Oregon, at a strategy session in Washington: “
Gentlemen, the first thing we have got to decide is a matter of fundamental policy. If we lose, will we bolt?”

The company sat stunned.
Bourne had been a founding member of the Progressive Republican League, set up more than a year before to advance the fortunes of Robert La Follette. As such, he was a courageous, even a rash man, willing to back the most radical challenger to Old Guard rule. But the question of “bolting” had never occurred to the League, which meant only to advance the cause of progressivism within the Party.

Bourne persisted with his motion. “
I move that we agree, here and now, and not be too secretive about our agreement, that if we lose, we bolt.”

There was silence while the politicians around the table considered their prospects. Those in Congress knew that apostasy would likely excommunicate them forever. And could progressivism, born of the Party, survive long without it? If Taft was nominated and then defeated as badly as everybody expected, it would be difficult even for GOP stalwarts to stay in office through the election of 1916. What real chance was there, at this late date, of Roosevelt recruiting enough delegates to commandeer the national convention in June?

William Allen White was in attendance. He was a bona fide progressive, but also, proudly, a member of the Republican National Committee, and hated the idea of splitting the Party. He sensed fear building in some quarters of the room. Senator Joseph Dixon of Montana had Bourne’s kind of recklessness, and so did their former colleague, Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, unseated by a Democrat in 1910. But Senators William E. Borah of Idaho, Moses E. Clapp of Minnesota, and Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas had won their seats as insurgents and enjoyed the balance of power they maintained in the upper chamber. White doubted they would willingly give that up. Representative Victor Murdock was for Roosevelt whatever happened, but understood the risks. “
This rebellion,” he had said earlier, “has a long, long way to go before it wins.”

With Bourne’s motion on the table, a debate ensued that sounded, to White, more loud than sincere. At the end, loyalty overcame expediency. A non-voting consensus was reached that the answer to the question was “yes.”